Philanthropist helps bring marathon opera to Australia

Melbourne philanthropist Maureen Wheeler contributed five million dollars to help bring Wagner's 16 hour marathon 'The Ring Cycle' to Australia for the first time.

Transcript

EMMA ALBERICI, PRESENTER: Opera lovers have been treated tonight to a dazzling $20 million performance in Melbourne.

Wagner's 16-hour marathon over four nights, The Ring Cycle, is being staged for the first time by Opera Australia, and it's all partly thanks to philanthropist Maureen Wheeler, who chipped in $5 million to make her dream a reality.

Anne Maria Nicholson reports.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON, REPORTER: Toasting to its success, Maureen Wheeler's gearing up to see The Ring Cycle not once, but three times over. That's 48 hours of opera.

MAUREEN WHEELER, PATRON: I would say it's the Olympics of opera in that it's the hardest, most difficult thing to sing and of course the time involved makes it a huge, huge thing.

LYNDON TERRACINI, OPERA AUSTRALIA: Without Maureen's and Tony's contribution, we certainly wouldn't be doing this. So, in this business, you need a bit of luck and we've had a bit of luck along the way.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: Maureen Wheeler's a self-confessed "Ring nut". She explored putting on her own show, but settled for giving $5 million to kickstart this, Neil Armfield's production of The Ring Cycle.

MAUREEN WHEELER: There had to be a serious commitment and that was sort of more or less the figure I picked out of the air and thought, "Well that will do it."

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: Maureen and husband Tony Wheeler made their fortunes from selling the Lonely Planet travel guide business to the BBC. Now they're giving a lot of it away, $10 to $12 million a year to the arts and humanitarian causes.

The complete cost of this production is $20 million, an enormous gamble for Opera Australia. The eye-wateringly expensive tickets flew out the door a year ago. Even so, the company expects to break even at best.

The eyes of the opera world are on this Wagner masterpiece; German music with an Australian twist.

And so too are those of the Victorian Government that pumped $4 million into expanding the orchestra pit of the State Theatre to fit the 110 Ring musicians.

There are ambitions for this to go on way beyond the next three weeks.

The stampede to buy tickets to this opera has buoyed hopes that it won't all be over in just three weeks. Wagner fans want Melbourne to become just as well known as The Ring capital as it is as the sports capital.

MAUREEN WHEELER: I mean, we can do the Golf Masters, we can do the Davis Cup, we can do all of these things, but we can also do this and we can do it brilliantly. And I would like that to be - the Melbourne Ring to go on.

LYNDON TERRACINI: If we could do it every three years, we would do the same production in three years' time and ideally three years after that and then do a new production and establish Melbourne as one of the most important Wagner centres in the world. That will be something very special.

ANNE MARIA NICHOLSON: It's the Holy Grail of opera, and like Wagner's characters, now that Melbourne's got The Ring, it wants to keep it.

Anne Maria Nicholson, Lateline.

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